Drift 1
My first post of a new series; three haiku for the Levant.
I’m excited to implement a new series, tentatively called Drift(s) (or do we like Draft(s) better?) which will be published each Friday. Unlike the more researched and edited essays I publish, this is a series of first drafts, or drifts. Or rather, in-process drafts/drifts. I wanted a space to support a more regular, creative, and regenerative writing practice. Though I imagine these exercises will mostly take on poetic form, there may also be an occasional visual post (a video I like, or a photograph or artwork, etc.)
I was inspired to begin a practice of writing haiku after reading Richard Wright’s Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon. (Which was also the subject of my first ever post on Substack.) Not only did I find enormous satisfaction contained in each small, syllabic minute, but I was impelled by Wright’s obsessive commitment to the form. So I took up the practice too.
These three haiku are of inspired observations, meaning they are about a nature I have not observed physically beyond story, photo, and video. I was bothered by the continuous reduction of Palestinian and Lebanese people to their suffering, to the idea of the Levant as a region that must intrinsically suffer. I hoped to use haiku to bring presence, especially my own, not only to what has been destroyed, but to what grows abundantly, what will grow abundantly again.
ODE TO AL-SHAM BY THREE HAIKU This land absorbs the skins of martyrs. This land promises wheat and stars. Worship it! We are its salt and its water. - Mahmoud Darwish, “Diary of a Palestinian Wound.” PRELUDE: From atmosphere draped lucid blue, russet- hued dates fall rapid to earth and burst, scatter in spectacle akin to birth. The seeds disperse, seeking root by which they came: a return to nurture. Honeyed offerings of swaying palm, tree of open fist anchored deep by the kin- shaded olive. Everything salted sweet of mineral sea, everything swept up in warm, brackish breeze. OLIVE Sun-dried silver gusts of olive brush dusting hill: a root to tend to. DATE Gifts of open palm, shedded alms of sky upon collapsed earth, sweet fruit. MEDITERRANEAN Iris blossomed blue ocean salted brusque and cool; soon, a cleansing rain.